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Thursday, March 10, 2016

IS document leak: Australian computer engineer identified on list of volunteer suicide bombers

The personnel file of a would-be suicide bomber who identifies as Australian is among tens of thousands of documents about Islamic State fighters leaked to Britain's Sky News.

The digital files contain 22,000 names, addresses, telephone numbers and family contacts of Islamic State jihadists. The German Government, which has also been give access to the documents, believes they are authentic.

Though not independently verified, the lists all have one thing in common: candidates offering themselves as suicide bombers.The Australian is listed as a 36-year-old computer engineer using the codename Abu Oubeida Al Loubnani.

At the bottom of the page, in additional notes, Abu Oubeida Al Loubnani declares that he cannot see very clearly at night-time and can only drive an automatic vehicle.

The man who stole the documents is a former Free Syrian Army convert to Islamic State.

Calling himself Abu Hamed, he said IS had now been taken over by former soldiers from the Iraqi Ba'ath Party of Saddam Hussein.

He claimed the Islamic rules he believed in had totally collapsed inside the organisation, prompting him to quit.

"I want to say to the people on the inside of this organisation, the organisation is a lie," Hamed said.

"It is not Islam. There is nothing that ever follows the sharia or Islam. It is far from Islam."

The documents were on a memory stick stolen from the head of the group's internal security police.

Justice Minister Michael Keenan will be in the German capital Berlin for talks next Monday, and described the leak as a timely coincidence.

"What it shows it that there's an enormous amount of internal discontent within ISIL (Islamic State), and the Westerners and other foreigners who have gone to fight alongside them are starting to understand the terrible nature of this regime — its violence, the fact that they use foreign fighters as cannon fodder," he said.

"It is starting to collapse internally because of the enormous pressure that we've placed on it.

"There's nothing further I can say about the documents apart from the fact that we have very close cooperation with our partners, and if there's information that we can share together and what we can learn from each other, then we'll clearly do that.

"All organisations obviously have different ways of storing information, but what is a revelation is the fact that it would be made public and the fact that it would be shared with one of our partners, one of our allies.

"And clearly I think that that is a significant point that we'll take out of this."Leak 'of enormous interest' to intel agencies

There were media reports in Germany on Monday about the documents and Sky published overnight, but Mr Keenan would not say when Australian officials became aware of them.

Security expert Rodger Shanahan, from the Lowy Institute, believes security agencies will take some time to sift through the documents.

"I think we've really got to look at the veracity of the sourcing first before we do anything, but if it is valid, it would be of enormous interest," he said.

"It's very rare that you get this kind of document that lists so many people, gives you so much information, gives so much technical information, including telephone numbers.

"So it's potentially a boon for intelligence agencies if it's a real list."

Mr Shanahan said one of the more significant aspects was that the identification of individuals also came with the identification of the person who recommended them.

"All intelligence agencies want to put together as comprehensive a modelling of the network as possible," he said.